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Mobilization around FTAA in 2019's Tunisia: Critique of Neo-Liberal Models of Free Trade and the Food Issue: Social and Spatial Justice in Question
Abstract
Since 2011 and the democratisation processes, the diversification of mobilisations has called into question the logic of access to regional and local resources, and calls for a fairer redistribution model for the inhabitants of these territories. This contributes to the emergence of a debate on the redefinition of agricultural development and resource management models. It is in this context that the mobilizations in connection with the negotiations around the FTAA (Comprehensive and Deepened Free Trade Agreement), the EU-Tunisia partnership concerning the agricultural sector, which emerged in Tunisia in 2019, have served as a reminder of the strategic nature and political dimension of a sector under pressure. In this paper, we will analyze these mobilizations as a tool for observing the evolution of power relations and competition between different types of actors in the definition of free trade policies for the agricultural sector, and allows to analyse the agricultural sector as a political resource for a diversity of actors. Thus, conflicts related to taxation, the agricultural map, and the issue of food and national sovereignty highlight the role of agricultural markets as a mode of economic and social regulation. Based on interviews with different types of mobilized actors, -associations, unions, institutional actors, farmers-, this paper highlights the role of different actors in building a movement that brings together different strong groups that go well beyond the agricultural sector base and rather converge to groups usually engaged in criticizing the liberal model and the organization of international free trade. A diversity of actors intervene and contribute to imposing the issue of FTAA as a political issue at the time of elections: politicization of the debate by the classic trade union organizations (UTAP, UGTT); fiscal issues and the representativeness of farmers' interests by associative groups; links between crises in intensive sectors and political crises by agro-industrial actors involved in the valorization of local agricultural resources (tomatoes, peppers, cereals). Beyond strictly partisan issues, this question then appears to be closely linked to major issues as state power, and raises the question of "food sovereignty". This refers in particular to the difficulty for public authorities to regulate prices for both producers and consumers and to the political dimension of the confrontation of economic models.
Discipline
Geography
Geographic Area
Tunisia
Sub Area
Maghreb Studies